January 30, 2010

Veteran broadcaster gone


One of the legends of South Dakota television has passed away. Veteran broadcaster Dave Deadrick died Friday, January 22nd in Sioux Falls.

While we had met Dave in the 1980s when he was still going strong at KELO-TV, we didn’t know him well. But his visage was well known for decades throughout east river – and later west river, when KELO expanded its television operation to Rapid City.

A long-time weatherman for KELO-TV Channel 11 in Sioux Falls, he was perhaps even better known as Captain 11, host of the longest-running children’s program in the country. It was a job he loved for 41 years.

He reportedly was the first voice broadcast by KELO-TV when it went on the air in May of 1953 and landed the job as Captain 11 by winning a coin toss! Dave was inducted into the South Dakota Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 1997 and the South Dakota Hall of Fame in 1999.

Dave Deadrick was 81 years old. Read Dave's full obituary.

January 29, 2010

A new decade, a new word

Our neighbor Lorraine Collins always has an interesting perspective on a wide range of topics. Here's another that should catch your interest -- and perhaps spur a comment or two. Her commentaries appear regularly in the Black Hills Pioneer, and this one helped launch us into the 21st century. She graciously allows us to share it with on-line readers here.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I was one of those who thought that the first decade of the 21st Century wouldn't be completed until the end of 2010. When we start counting, we begin with the number one, after all, and when sorting things by tens, whether years or pennies, we end with the number 10. So why was everyone insisting that 2009 ended a decade? I suppose it was because we started with zero, or three of them, in 2000. So by 2009 we'd lived through ten years, and thus a decade, but it still didn't seem right to me.

A decahedron has ten faces, a decagon has ten angles and ten sides, and the Ten Commandments are a Decalogue. Knowing all this, it's just hard for me to accept that the number 9 ended a decade. I'll have to get used to it, I know. Just as I've had to accept the fact that when people talk about an event that "decimated" a town, they really mean it devastated the town, not that only 10% was ruined. Originally, I believe the word decimate meant that a conqueror would line up the defeated troops and count off, selecting every tenth one to be killed. In this case, only those unlucky fellows would be decimated and the other 9 in the group were spared.

At the end of one decade and the beginning of another, pundits and prognosticators have a tendency to recall momentous events of the previous ten years and try to predict what the next ten years will bring. I read and heard quite a few of these the first week of January. There was some hope for peace and prosperity, for the end of the wars, the flourishing of science and art, the building of a stable economy. Of course others predicted even more armed conflicts, natural disasters and the disintegration of civilization as we know it. Given the violent attack on our homeland, economic collapse, and the misguided adventure of invading Iraq, we can see why Apocalyptic predictions do have a certain appeal. Enough bad things happened in the last decade to make us fear what might happen in this one.

So, are we getting better and better every day, or are we just waiting for the next catastrophe to show up as a distant blip on our radar screens, moving inexorably and ominously closer? In a delightful book titled "Archie and Mehitabel" written by Don Marquis early in the 20th Century, he wrote that "An optimist is a guy that has never had much experience." By now I've had a lot of experience, but I'm going to be optimistic anyway. I'm going to be optimistic because I think maybe we are actually going to start paying attention to something called accountability.

I tend to think that citizens in the United States and several other countries are fed up with lame excuses and such non-accountable explanations as "mistakes were made." We've heard too much of that over the last decade. We're fed up with people, whether on Wall Street or Washington or in state government or in business not being held accountable, not accepting personal responsibilities for their actions. This gives me some reason for optimism, if not "irrational exuberance."

When people start demanding accountability, not only from those in positions of political and economic power, but from themselves, and how they conduct their lives and the decisions they make, then I do think there's hope for the future. Democracies depend on an informed and literate population, which means people have to think, to be able to distinguish mindless rants from reasoned argument, and to be willing to hold themselves as well as their leaders accountable.

If there's a word I want to hear in this new decade, it's accountability. Let's see how much of that we find in this new year of the new decade. It may tell us how the other nine years will go.


Lorraine Collins is a writer who lives in Spearfish. She can be contacted at collins1@rushmore.com.

January 27, 2010

Ink for needless art

One of our pet-peeves while working in radio news years ago was the gratuitous use of what we called “actualities” -- small snippets of sound, or comments by newsmakers or observers.

When they really added substance to a story, and they often did, such devices were invaluable. But using an actuality just for the sake of using an actuality was – and is -- sloppy. It adds nothing to the story.

Such is the case with unnecessary “art” for daily newspapers and other print media.

I was reminded of this yesterday (1/26/10) when the Rapid City Journal ran a photograph of Chris Nelson, South Dakota Secretary of State. It was attached to a short story in which Nelson reminded candidates, political parties and others, that the deadline for campaign finance reports is just around the corner. The story was likely a routine press release out of Nelson’s office. Certainly not a big story, but probably worth some ink. But Journal editors could have done without the photograph.

Is it important that I know what this guy looks like? If so, I could take a peek at any of the 100+ photos of him that the Journal has used over the past few years (Okay, okay, I didn't really count them all).

I’ve never met Chris Nelson, but I suspect he’s doing a pretty good job as Secretary of State, based upon what I’ve heard and read.

Oh, yes, did I mention he’s running for Congress? Now that’s the Chris Nelson story that deserved an accompanying photo!

January 21, 2010

Fighting "...irrational negativity"


This has been an interesting week.

The Denver Post’s parent company has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The New York Times is positioned to start charging for its on-line content. And the Rapid City Journal’s owner – Lee Enterprises – reports revenues for 2009 dropped by 18.2 percent.

In fact, Lee indicated that its yearend report was actually encouraging news. Fourth Quarter revenues were down by 14%. Lee owns the Rapid City Journal, the Bismarck (ND) Tribune, the Casper Star-Tribune, and several Montana papers among its stable of some 53 dailies. They also operate more than 300 “specialty” publications in 23 states.

Lee CEO Mary Junck, in a letter to stockholders, ticked off a wide range of Lee accomplishments, including the refinancing of $1.3 billion of debt and streamlined operations.

“Through intense collaboration, our editors redesigned our pages to a reduced width of 11 inches, gaining approval from readers and advertisers,” Junck wrote. That move helped Lee shave newsprint usage by 31 percent.

Interestingly, Lee has launched a public relations campaign to combat what Junck called the continuing, “irrational negativity” about the future of newspapers. One of the PR steps was producing the "business card" similar to the one shown here for the Rapid City Journal, touting the audience and performance of Lee. Click on the card to see how the Journal and other Lee papers are attacking that negativity. Similar cards were done for all of Lee’s 53 daily newspapers.

Meanwhile, over in Colorado, Denver Post CEO Dean Singleton is promising no layoffs as a result of imminent Chapter 11 bankruptcy for MediaNews Group, a Denver-based organization that owns the Post, Boulder Camera, and 52 other daily newspapers. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that MediaNews has been “teetering for months.” The bankruptcy will reportedly reduce MediaNews debt from $930 million to $165 million, and Singleton suggested employees play up the positive aspects of the Chapter 11 filing.

Perhaps Singleton and Junck – and many newspaper executives have been talking with one another about how to paint a rosier picture.

To be sure, we’re hopeful that newspapers can re-invent themselves into a sustainable product that endures for years to come. Perhaps I’m old fashioned (perhaps??!!) but thumbing through and reading the morning paper is a joy I don’t want to give up.

On-line news just isn’t quite as cathartic. Especially if you have to pay for it, after having enjoyed free access to the New York Times for such a long time. One of the last holdouts offering free access to its on-line version, the Times will likely announce within the next few weeks exactly how it expects to monetize its on-line services.

We support charging for these services. But exactly how such fees are assessed and at what level will be a challenge. We like the “tease” approach being used by the Black Hills Pioneer (a Seaton publication), whereby you can read a paragraph or two – and possibly enjoy a photo – before being prompted to click a link to “…read more.” That’s when readers can subscribe to the full-meal deal and read the entire paper on-line.

On-line journalism is likely to continue to grow. We trust it will also get significantly better. If newspapers can survive and then thrive in a modified form, that would be a good thing, giving us some choices.

For now, we’re entrenched with one foot in the print world and one in the on-line world. We can live with that.

January 14, 2010

Here we are again already

Our neighbor Lorraine Collins always has an interesting perspective on a wide range of topics. Here's another that should catch your interest -- and perhaps spur a comment or two. Her commentaries appear regularly in the Black Hills Pioneer, and this one appeared in the December 16, 2009 edition. She graciously allows us to share it with on-line readers here.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Maybe it's because as we get older time seems to go by faster, but it seems to me that it was just yesterday, rather than December a year ago, that Governor Rounds was delivering his 2008 Budget Address and asking Legislators to go home and encourage all their constituents to go out and buy something to help out with sales tax revenue. Apparently this didn't work because last week the governor delivered his 2009 Budget Address and said revenues were "flat" while expenses have been going up. But this time, he didn't ask the Legislators to go home and ask us to spend more money, presumably because he knows many of us can't.

According to his speech, unemployment is the highest since1985 and unemployed people don't buy a lot of stuff. The governor said that the number of people on Medicaid has now reached 110,000, with more people enrolling in the program in the last ten months than in the previous four years. It was pretty clear a year ago that we were going to have what's called a "shortfall" in terms of income versus expenses. That is, the state was in the same trouble many of its citizens are every month. And it still is.

As I listened carefully to the governor's address which largely consisted of a blizzard of statistics, I scribbled down various notes which I now have difficulty reading. But by now, there have been editorial comments, objections, amplifications, and suggested alternatives to the governor's proposed budget and I think I get the gist of it. The governor made a point of saying that 49 cents of every budget dollar goes toward education, from kindergarten to graduate school, and that 36 cents goes toward "taking care of people." So 85% of the state budget goes for education and social services, and one would have to be a Scrooge or a Grinch to object to that.

However, he said he could not increase state aid to education at all, although I thought there was a law that says schools are supposed to get an increase every year amounting to 3% or the rate of inflation, whichever is less. It wouldn't have amounted to much this year, but it would have been something. It will be interesting to see what the Legislature does with that. Every year there are various proposals to increase state aid to education, to revise the formula or change the rules, and every year we seem to go along more or less as we have been.

In talking about a "structural deficit" the governor said the deficit isn't caused "by our spending being out of control." I guess it isn't, since we rank so low in state support to education that it' s embarrassing. However, Representative Bernie Hunhoff of Yankton, minority leader of the House, said that growth of state government has been at twice the rate of inflation and he thought there should be cuts in the bureaucracy. That might be a good idea, but whether that would make any significant difference in making more money available to education is something I tend to doubt.

The fact is, state just doesn't take in enough money to meet current expenses and the only way we've been able to maintain things as well as we have is that the federal government pitches in more money than we do. It was interesting to note that state revenues for the general fund to support the governor's budget amounted to $1.2 billion while federal funds amounted to $1.9 billion. So I don't think we should complain too much about federal interference in our state.
~
Governor Rounds closed his speech by remarking "We all believe in the common good." It's a good thing that taxpayers in the other 49 states are helping us out and I hope they continue to believe in our common good, until we can figure out how to come up with more money ourselves.
Lorraine Collins is a writer who lives in Spearfish. She can be reached at collins1@rushmore.com.

Lorraine Collins is a writer who lives in Spearfish. She can be contacted at
collins1@rushmore.com.

January 2, 2010

Looking for transparency


It’s hard to cut through the crap.

Over the past many months, we’ve been bombarded with claims and counter-claims regarding health care reform. It’s likely to continue for the next several weeks with no real resolution in sight for the American people.

From assertions that we have the “best health care system in the world” to protestations that it’s “a broken health care system,” politicians and analysts of all stripes have hashed and re-hashed the topic with much hoopla but little clarity. Most of the dialogue has been in a less than thoughtful context, usually displayed in “point-counterpoint” sound bites with little substance.

We remain skeptical of the hyperbole offered from both sides of this squabble, but each has offered at least some evidence to justify their position – so it’s easy to be confused by the babble surrounding this important issue.

Passage of the Senate health care bill in the wee hours of December 21st was tainted with “compromise.” $100 million for the University Hospital in Senator Chris Dodd’s home state of Connecticut; exemptions from insurance fees for Michigan Blue Cross/Blue Shield; giving Florida a $ 3 billion to $5 billion sweetheart exemption from losing Medicare Advantage benefits; and numerous other deals.

None was more egregious than the $100 million federal payment for new Medicaid coverage in Nebraska – as well as an exemption from an insurance fee for Nebraska Blue Cross/Blue Shield and Mutual of Omaha.

Only days earlier, while visiting the Cornhusker state, we heard local radio stations playing sound bites in which Nebraska’s U.S. Senator Ben Nelson denied allegations that he and Nebraska had been threatened with federal cuts, if he didn’t support the administration’s health bill.

Rather than asking Nelson if he’d been threatened, reporters should have been asking him if he had been approached with bribes….er, “compromises.” Despite proclaiming that his vote “wasn’t for sale,” it was only a matter of hours before Nelson signed on to the health care package, greasing the skids to Nebraska for lots of federal money – at the expense of all other states.

But even these distasteful events weren’t what left us most disheartened.

Rather, it was the assurances offered earlier by President Obama that health care reform discussions would be out in the open and involve a wide range of players. They would even be aired on C-SPAN, he said. This turned out to be not true. There’ve been allegations that few senators even read the 2,100 page bill.

And when it comes time for a conference between the House and Senate versions of health care reform, it seems the president has chosen the West Wing of the White House as the location.

We believe our health care system is in serious need of reform, and we’re unconvinced that Congress is moving in the right direction. The fact that it has been back-room politics as usual, rather than the promised open deliberations, leaves us wondering if the only thing needing more attention than health care might be the Obama administration claim to "openness."

It’s highly unlikely we’ll ever see cameras in the West Wing, but President Obama could go a long way toward regaining citizen support by re-visiting his promise of government transparency and pushing for 11th hour C-SPAN coverage of this enormously important subject. But don't hold your breath.